Socialist Realism or Cybernetics? Music, Information Theory, and Posthumanism in the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

In their preface to Musikästhetik in der Diskussion (1981), the editors of the volume, Harry Goldschmidt and Georg Knepler, proclaim that “a new movement has made its mark on the field of music aesthetics,” a movement that promises to enrich the understanding of music with new impulses and approaches.1 In making this statement, the two eminent East German musicologists referred less to a global trend in the music aesthetics of their time than to its internal development in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), beginning in the late 1960s. Yet, the new aesthetic movement they duly identified would not have been possible without knowledge of major scientific developments that flourished outside the Eastern Bloc after World War II. Characterized by concepts about communication and sign systems, this movement was sustained by theoretical models originating in the scientific field of cybernetics and in the closely related area of information theory. As a reporter of the Berliner Zeitung observed in 1968, the new developments in science had a strong impact on Marxist aesthetic theory, which then was already confronted by challenges from art itself: Marxist aesthetics has been on the move in the GDR for some time. New social processes and factors demand their reflection by the socialist artist and thus at the same time [call for] a deepening of the theory of socialist realism: new features and dimensions of modern scientific development (cybernetics, semiotics, sociology, social psychology, etc.) pose new problems for aesthetic theory.2